Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

By Drew Daniel

Consulting an extensive archive of early modern literature, Joy of the Worm asserts that voluntary death in literature is not always a matter of tragedy.
 
In this study, Drew Daniel identifies a surprisingly common aesthetic attitude that he calls “joy of the worm,” after Cleopatra’s embrace of the deadly asp in Shakespeare’s play—a pattern where voluntary death is imagined as an occasion for humor, mirth, ecstatic pleasure, even joy and celebration. 

Daniel draws both a historical and a conceptual distinction between “self-killing” and “suicide.” Standard intellectual histories of suicide in the early modern period have understandably emphasized attitudes of abhorrence, scorn, and severity toward voluntary death. Daniel reads an archive of literary scenes and passages, dating from 1534 to 1713, that complicate this picture. In their own distinct responses to the surrounding attitude of censure, writers including Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Addison imagine death not as sin or sickness, but instead as a heroic gift, sexual release, elemental return, amorous fusion, or political self-rescue. “Joy of the worm” emerges here as an aesthetic mode that shades into schadenfreude, sadistic cruelty, and deliberate “trolling,” but can also underwrite powerful feelings of belonging, devotion, and love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9780226816517

Book preview

Cover Page for Joy of the Worm

Joy of the Worm

Thinking Literature

A series edited by Nan Z. Da and Anahid Nersessian

Joy of the Worm

Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

Drew Daniel

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2022 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81649-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81650-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81651-7 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226816517.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Daniel, Drew, 1971– author.

Title: Joy of the worm : suicide and pleasure in early modern English literature / Drew Daniel.

Other titles: Thinking literature.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Series: Thinking literature | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021041556 | ISBN 9780226816494 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226816500 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226816517 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. | Suicide in literature.

Classification: LCC PR408.S845 D36 2022 | DDC 820.9/3548—dc23/eng/20211101

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021041556

The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Johns Hopkins University toward the publication of this book.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Dedicated to the memory of

Margaret Louise Farrell

1920–1978

Contents

Introduction · Renaissance Self-Finishing

Chapter 1 · Failed Seriousness in the Old Arcadia and Gallathea

Chapter 2 · Slapstick and Synapothanumenon in Antony and Cleopatra

Chapter 3 · Trolling Decorum in Hamlet and Timon of Athens

Chapter 4 · The Open Window in Biathanatos

Interlude · Inventing Suicide in Religio Medici

Chapter 5 · A Cartoon about Suicide Prevention in Paradise Lost

Chapter 6 · Smiling at Daggers in Cato, a Tragedy

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

[ Introduction ]

Renaissance Self-Finishing

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

Dorothy Parker, Resumé

Humorously deflating an ethical absolute into a practical matter, Dorothy Parker’s poem works through the suicidal impulse in order to empty it out. Making light of plight, this tetrameter trifle proceeds via a productive sophistry: the question Should you kill yourself? is bypassed in favor of How should you kill yourself? There is no particular means that avoids pain, damp, stains, smells, or illegality, and the drudgery of such considerations drains the scenario of its punctual force. In encouraging the person on the ledge to inhabit their body at the moment of self-killing rather than their suicidal mind, Parker foregrounds the sensory openness of that body, its vulnerability to pain and privation. Coaxed by degrees across two quatrains, the would-be suicide is walked back toward an imaginary place that inverts these fraught end points: if not absolutely painless, dry, sweet-smelling, or law-abiding, then at least more nearly so. But the focus isn’t really upon the mortal body but upon the equipment required for the body’s disposal. Means upstage ends. Suddenly, the tools of suicide loom larger than the suffering body they deliver to death, and we trip on a pileup of razors and acids and guns and ropes. Suicide sounds like too much trouble.

Parker’s morbid bonbon of a poem exemplifies a broader dynamic that will interest me in this book: the means by which literature can work through the possibility of voluntary death, both inhabiting and containing suicidal ideation, alternately ramping affects up and dialing them down, running out the clock until a feeling cools off. Comedy names the generic zone of affective transformation and energetic exchange in which mockery and rehabilitation trade places. On site, damage and repair can be hard to distinguish. Parker’s Resumé expands upon the questions of intent already coyly posed by the title of the book in which it appears: Enough Rope.¹ Is Parker mocking those who lack sincerity in their fatal resolve, or working overtime to distract her own self-destructive will? In either case, is she addressing a friend, herself, the reader, or all three? What are the terms of survival held out by the slender hope that one might as well carry on? Like survival itself, comedy doesn’t (always, only) feel good. Here, comedy lets us forgive ourselves for our continuing failure to die.

While Parker’s poem glances at political surrounds in the invocation of the law and its obverse, another register is a complete no-show: religion. Attuned to a mind and body at war, Parker doesn’t seem to worry about the consequences of suicide for the soul, or the transcendental possibilities of divine punishment or forgiveness that might follow from the suicidal decision. A tempting term to describe such a suspension of posthumous concern would be secular: Parker’s poem, true to its historical location in modernity, cruises suicide as a possible choice in a material world of suffering bodies.² Bracketing for now the complexity with which both modernity and secularity can be troubled, rolled forward or back at will, such a suspension was not quite available in the period and context that concerns this book: post-Reformation early modern England. For Hamlet, the question of suicide is strongly overdetermined by the existence of an Everlasting who has fixed / His canon ’gainst self-slaughter (1.2.131–32).³ Dominant theological frames across confessions presented such deaths as heinous sins against God, committed at the instigation of the devil. Even when Christian sanction lifted, to exempt a select category of admirable martyrs or virtuous pagans from broad and categorical abhorrence, for early modern people voluntary death was always a serious matter.

Except when it wasn’t.

For a case in point, consider the following story. Awaiting death, a man writes a book. Confined to the Tower of London and certain of his coming execution, in 1534 Sir Thomas More writes A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, a fictional dialogue between the young Vincent and his wise uncle Anthony, set against the backdrop of Hungary clenched in anticipation of imminent invasion by the Turk.⁴ However driven by tacit complaint against Henry VIII, More keeps homily foremost. Through the Socratic sock puppetry of intergenerational dialogue, More asks himself and his readers how we ought to experience tribulation: as a spiritual resource, an index of divine trial, a joyous path to our own salvation? Given the grim circumstances in which it was crafted, it is perhaps unsurprising that More’s text relays a longing for death. Given the predominant contemporary theories of where such urges came from, it is perhaps equally unsurprising that More understands the urge to kill the self as an instrument of satanic temptation.

But what one might not expect is the generic form that his discussion takes. Namely, the situation of self-killing becomes the windup for a grotesque joke. Spurred on by the devil, a familiarly shrewish wife desires that her husband kill her so that he will go to hell. She nags and wheedles him into the act, pestering him relentlessly while he is chopping wood, and then placing her own neck upon a block and demanding that he end her life:

By the mass, whoreson husband, I would thou wouldest; here lieth mine head, lo! And wherewith down she laid her head upon the same timber log. If thou smite it not off, I beshrew thine whoreson’s heart. With that, likewise as the devil stood at her elbow, so stood (as I heard say) his good angel at his, and gave him ghostly courage, and bade him be bold and do it. And so the good man up with his chip-axe, and at a chop chopped off her head indeed. There were standing other folk by, which had a good sport to hear her chide, but little they looked for this chance till it was done ere they could let it. They said they heard her tongue babble in her head, and call Whoreson, whoreson twice after that the head was from her body.⁵

This gruesomely misogynist story illuminates a surrounding and still-ongoing patriarchal poetics that it has been the task of feminist history to reconstruct and analyze: everyday fantasies of femicide are part of a spectrum of gendered discipline that linked sermons and conduct manuals with scold’s bridles and Scottish branks in the early modern period, as they link casual sexism and workplace microaggressions with incel massacres and domestic abuse today.⁶ Though it clashes against his enshrined critical reputation as a doting father who gave his male and female children identical humanist educations in Greek and Latin, the cartoonish violence of More’s misogynist tale comes as no surprise to those familiar with the lurid cruelties recounted in the ballad sources for Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew.⁷ Here, misogyny reworks More’s own immediate situation; condensing the logic of fantasy, one might suggest that More is the shrew, Henry VIII is the husband, and the book he is writing is the tongue that will not be silent even after death.

Contemporary readers might well find this story unpleasant and therefore resist the discovery of humor within it. Such reflexes draw an ethical cordon around the representation of harm and damage, one already anticipated in Aristotle’s definition of the laughable in the Poetics as a sort of error and ugliness that is not painful and destructive, just as, evidently, a laughable mask is something ugly and distorted without pain.⁸ Pain matters. When the generic rules of the road are observed, comedy is not supposed to depict suffering past a certain threshold. But the Aristotelian injunction not to derive comic pleasure from harm is less like a Mosaic tablet carved in stone and more like a NO SWIMMING sign perched beside a cool blue pool on a hot day. Five seconds on Reddit will show you that people laugh at harm and damage all the time. Sometimes, as in More’s joke about decapitation written as he awaited his day on the block, or in Parker’s funny poem about suicide written in between her multiple attempts, the people doing the laughing have serious reasons for refusing to take serious things seriously.

But sometimes they don’t. Proscribing some reactions and encouraging others, everyday life in emotional communities requires ongoing labors of comportment, the ongoing stage-managing of seriousness and its licensed holidays.⁹ Injunctions about laughter and its customary restraint work toward an intelligible moral end, and typically assume a tacit self-understanding: we do not want to be known as the kind of people who would take the wrong sort of pleasure from a story of suffering, pain, and death. But the task of reading More’s cruelly comedic story requires that we enter the habits of mind that not only generated and circulated such stories but also assumed they would give pleasure to their audience. To use a contemporary expression, we have to sit with these stories, and assess them for what they reveal about the elasticity of norms.

In this story, a subject ensures her own death voluntarily, and solicits another person to assist her in the practical business of ending her life. She makes sure that she dies en route toward a seemingly more important goal: the damnation of her husband. We are not in the presence of depression or a pathological mood disorder, nor is the topic presented as tragic or lamentable at the level of tone. Far from a path to damnation, this death is presented ironically, as good sport, a merry jest and good riddance to a scold. We are not, that is, in the presence of what modern people would understand as suicide, but we are in the presence of self-killing.

Between Self-Killing and Suicide

The distinction between self-killing and suicide names both a difference in connotation and a specific historical rupture. Early modern people used an array of terms to describe voluntary death. When a substantive noun was called for, a composite, variously spelled self-murther or self-murder, was popular, but they did not use the word suicide, because the word had not been invented yet.¹⁰ It enters the language only in 1643, when Sir Thomas Browne, in the midst of revisions to his prose meditation Religio Medici, adjusts the phrase the end of Cato to read the end and Suicide of Cato.¹¹ In due time, the present book will assess the force and valence of Browne’s lightning flash of neologism, measuring the distance the word has traveled from the moment it was minted to its connotations today. I am not asserting in a narrowly nominalist manner that the term’s creation signaled all by itself a decisive and instantaneous conceptual change. Rather, it was the fate of Browne’s term to come to designate an action that modernity has significantly overwritten in its own image.

Mindful of these moving targets, I distinguish self-killing from suicide in order to highlight what we think we already know about suicide, so that a conceptual gap can reopen. For modern readers, suicide summons up a paradoxical climate, at once drably familiar and highly charged. This climate is defined by public health prevention protocols, psychiatric observation, unequally distributed SSRI prescriptions, demographically stratified incidence rates, and seemingly endless spirals of loss. Like any complex behavior, suicide occasions disciplinary conflict between rival ways of knowing, as competing frames jostle to define a shared object of concern.¹² Despite their differences, both Freudian psychoanalysis and subsequent psychological treatment paradigms frame suicide in terms of clinical understandings of bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, or major depression; suicide is a patient outcome to be avoided, through either therapeutic treatment or pharmaceutical intervention.¹³ It is best understood at the level of the individual. By contrast, Durkheimian sociology encourages a totalizing view of suicide, as a demographic phenomenon of implied social forces acting upon and within variegated populations in scientifically predictable ways that can be analyzed through the parsing of statistical data. It is best understood at the level of the group. Together, these rival fields—both of which, at different altitudes, evaluate motivation—have generated the hybrid modern field of suicidology, a prevention-oriented domain of knowledge that attempts to bridge the discursive chasm between these theoretical perspectives within a broad ideation-to-action framework.¹⁴

Suicide is both universally accessible to mortal beings and yet deeply inflected by the fundamentally political fact that unequal access to resources and social power tends to track with variable rates of attempted and completed suicide. Accordingly, we live in the era in which the overlapping plights of the indebted,¹⁵ the farmer,¹⁶ the veteran,¹⁷ the opioid addict,¹⁸ the unemployed,¹⁹ the trans person,²⁰ the person of color,²¹ the young person²²—in all of the attendant complexity that intersectional analysis rightly insists upon—find their objective correlative in variably rising and falling waves of death. These observable variations would seem to confirm Durkheim’s essential point that for each social group there is a specific tendency to suicide explained neither by the organic-psychic constitution of individuals nor the nature of the physical environment. Consequently, by elimination, it must necessarily depend upon social causes and be in itself a collective phenomenon.²³ As a practical example of how to address such social causes at the policy level, current economic research demonstrates that in communities that increase the minimum wage, suicide rates decline.²⁴ Alarmed at declining life expectancy within the United States relative to other developed countries, even unabashedly pro-capitalist economists such as Anne Case and Angus Deaton are calling for ambitious structural change to health care, educational opportunities, and employment in order to stem the rising tides of such deaths of despair.²⁵

Sharpening the implications of treating suicide as a collective phenomenon into a Foucauldian critique of psychology’s individualist bias, in Suicide: Foucault, History, and Truth (2010) Ian Marsh argues that suicide binds kinds of persons to types of acts within an overarching regime of medical power-knowledge whose core tenets can be loosely paraphrased as follows:

1. A completed suicide is the violent, tragic act of a mentally ill person.

2. Everyone at risk of committing suicide should be counseled away from this outcome.

3. Suicidal behavior is prima facie evidence of someone in psychological crisis.

4. Accordingly, suicide is best explained by psychiatrists, psychologists, and medical professionals.²⁶

At first glance, these broad generalizations might seem self-explanatory, even obviously and intuitively right to many readers. Presented with borderline situations and edge phenomena that do not conform to them (a terminally ill patient requesting end-of-life assistance, a soldier rushing into battle, an activist protesting injustice, a person taking part in extreme sports, a person hoping their family’s finances are stabilized by a life-insurance payment in the wake of their death), our response would likely be, "Oh, but I don’t mean that when I say suicide. Such intuitive distinctions are borne out by the linguistic history of the words that cultures use to designate an action; linguist David Daube points out that the description of suicide as a kind of killing antedates its description as a kind of dying."²⁷ There has been a broad but decisive shift from an ethical focus upon the self-killer as agent to a medical focus upon the departed as victim. This change tells us something: the distinction between suicide as preventable tragedy and self-killing as chosen act is not simply a matter of historical nicety about the coinage of 1643 but indexes ongoing conceptual impasses in how we imagine and argue about life, ethics, value, and autonomy.

At times in this book, as I read the cultural artifacts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I will draw upon and engage insights and claims from contemporary writers in psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, bioethics, and suicidology. In advocating for the distinction between self-killing and suicide, I seek, in sympathy with Marsh, to push back against the assumption of psychopathology in those who wish, or attempt, to end their own lives.²⁸ Simply put, self-killing includes a wider array of forms of voluntary death than suicide, because it is not saddled with overfamiliar connotations of pathology and mood disorder. Early modern literature teems with such an array of forms because it was written before those connotations took hold.

Like Marsh, I too am interested in how individuals are constituted as subjects in relations to the truths of suicide, but the individuals I am discussing are characters within plays and poems and romances, and narrators within prose.²⁹ I am interested in genre’s power as aesthetic frame (or, in Rosalie Colie’s terminology, set on the world) as it locates individuals within socially extended power relations that precede them and steer our affective reactions to scenes of harm, slaloming between sorrow and laughter.³⁰ To risk some overbroad assertions of my own, genre is a technology that manages difference and repetition as it depicts and reinforces or playfully subverts ongoing processes of social stratification.³¹ Genre’s technology mediates the dialectical conflict between group and individual within all literary representation as such. A less inflamed way to say this is that we scan individual characters and their actions against an inescapably prior, tacit background of expectations regarding socially legible types and narrative outcomes.³² Genre is one name for that background.

Genre Trouble

Omnipresent yet slippery, genre is what nobody really believes in but everyone relies upon. Whether one is writing literary criticism or simply grazing the pull-down menu on Netflix, we expect genre’s thin but sturdy tether to bind together an implausibly wide array of qualities within a work: the kinds of action within a plot, the way a story will end, the kinds of characters who will appear as primary, the kind of language that they will use, and the emotional tone a work solicits. Taking its origin from the very concept of originality, genre, in its derivation from the Latin word genus, provocatively conflates birth, origin, race, sort, and kind.³³ That last word is primary in early modernity, for its protobiological connotations relay Aristotelian naturalist habits of mind, homely metaphors of animal husbandry, and shifting logics of racialization. Describing the relational networks of early modern genre systems in The Resources of Kind, Rosalie Colie notes the basis of early modern genre theories in a body of almost unexpressed assumptions, many of them versions of classical theory or practice, which took for granted certain basic rules of expression.³⁴ What are those rules?

It is hard to spell out the implications of Aristotle’s inescapably significant yet notoriously incomplete lecture notes without generating an inert, unappealing straw person in the process.³⁵ More a gappy cluster of suggestions than a stern rulebook of prescription, the Poetics is, for better and for worse, not a unified theory of art, but its core terms and structural antitheses usefully reveal the gearbox of social stratification that churns within aesthetic categories.³⁶ A revealing case in point is Aristotle’s contrast between those who are spoudaios (noble, good, serious) and those who are phaulos (base, common, unserious) within dramatic art and poetry; this conflation of social location in a hierarchy with ethical norms of evaluation and emotional temperaments or tacit attitudes casts a long and suggestive shadow. Further reinforcing these habits of sorting, the medieval and early modern recirculation of the Virgilian rota tethered grand, middle, and low styles of speech to correspondingly high, middle, and low social positions: the heroes of epic speak one way, and the shepherds of pastoral another.³⁷ Such assumptions fit some authors, works, and characters better than others, and subsequent artists across mediums were to do increasingly wild backflips off these stiff pronouncements. But the expectation of normative alignment between kinds of stories, kinds of agents, and emotional stances proposed by Aristotle, and reified by his subsequent translators and readers and interpreters, stuck for a reason.

Centuries of artistic practice and everyday habits of decorum presume self-killing’s essential seriousness, which follows obviously and intuitively from its irreversible lethality when completed. These absolute stakes secure the place of voluntary death as a suitable, even definitive, subject for tragic representation and the attendant catharsis that it was the purpose of tragedy to elicit, the right sort of object for "the mimesis of a memorable act possessed of megethos or amplitude."³⁸ From Ajax to Antigone to Jocasta to Phaedra and beyond, self-killing ticks the boxes of tragic definition: it is an action of a certain magnitude undertaken by powerful agents who typically speak in a dignified manner and suffer in a way that prompts the purgation of fear and pity in readers and audience members, who are expected to take the unfolding spectacle of such deaths seriously. The overlap of a generic mode and an attitude toward that mode was ratified by language; in medieval and early modern English, seriousness and sadness were literally synonymous.³⁹

Comedy, at least in the overtly schematized definitions extracted from Aristotle’s Poetics by medieval and early modern commentary, entails a symmetrically contrasting but complementary scaffolding: a humorous tone, a set of suitably risible agents of the middling sort, an accordingly low manner of speaking.⁴⁰ These elements join and prime an audience for merriment and mockery, to laugh at what is ugly and ridiculous in the spectacle before them. In the early modern period such priming work also included nervous promises not to overstep mirth with modesty into legally actionable slander or violations of propriety; Nicholas Udall’s prologue to his play Ralph Roister Doister (ca. 1553) promises fun, but also reassures its hearers that it is a work: "Wherein all scurrility we utterly refuse, / Avoiding such mirth wherein is abuse.⁴¹ Genre is a matter of knowing one’s place. When, in act 5 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the aristocrats snicker at the rude mechanicals’ staging of Pyramus and Thisbe, their reaction confirms the intuitions that structure the class matrix of early modern genre theory: hard-handed men (5.1.1909) tend to be laughingstocks.⁴² That said, we should avoid reifying early modern generic distinctions as overly strong or categorical. If the titular examples of Xystus Betuleius’s Susanna: Comedia Tragica (1538) or Nicholas Grimald’s Christus Redivivus, comedia tragica, sacra et nova (1543) are any indication, the cheerful fusion of generic categories that we might at present regard as oxymoronic was in fact quite permissible in the period, and habits of hardening distinction between them emerged only gradually.⁴³

Stories solicit stances toward actions, opening out the array of possible relations that we can take to one another; sequences of cause and effect calibrate punishment and reward, as literature encourages us to identify with some agents and to disidentify with others, to regard some actions as heroic and others as shameful. Hotwiring together mirth and abuse, More’s text imagines self-killing as both a demonic temptation and a source of comedic fun. So far, the intellectual history of self-killing has emphasized prevalent attitudes of horror at such deaths, and the divine register of satanic temptations as their principal etiological explanation. As a case in point, consider Doctor John Dee’s diary entry from 1577: 3. Nov. William Rogers of Mortlake, about 7 of the clock in the morning, cut his own throat by the fiend his instigation.⁴⁴

Dee was not alone in thinking this way. The most strikingly documented case of this phenomenon is that of seventeenth-century woodturner Nehemiah Wallington, a Londoner whose notebooks record numerous suicidal crises and suicide attempts; driven by religious despair and the fear of damnation, Wallington transcribes a tempter’s voice commanding him to destroy thyselfe now.⁴⁵ Pamphlet literature of the period repeatedly represented cases of self-murder as the tragic result of demonic or satanic suggestion. The anonymous author of the salacious pamphlet The Bloudy Booke, or the Tragicall and desperate end of Sir John Fites [Fitz] (1605), on the verge of narrating his titular criminal’s final self-destruction, pauses to imagine the disgraced knight troubled with the threatninges of Sathan, who visibly (it may be) appeared vnto him, menacing him with eternal damnation for his fourmer wickednesse.⁴⁶ The assumption of self-killing’s demonic provenance was widespread, and surely contributed to the reflexive attitudes of scorn, horror, and disgust that such deaths occasioned during the period. But these examples of religious abhorrence are not the whole story.

The intellectual history of early modern attitudes toward voluntary death has largely avoided a reckoning with what this book will show is in fact a pronounced contrary aesthetic tendency: surges of positive affect, humor, and pleasure found within textual representations of self-harm, self-sacrifice, and violent death. If courtrooms and churches and diaries were spaces in which the severe punishments and moral repudiation took place, then plays and poems and romances and prose meditations offered adjacent but distinct spaces, where heads can roll to the sound of laughter.

This emphasis upon positive affect prompted by a negative occasion puts me distinctly at odds with previous scholarly accounts. Many intellectual histories of suicide exist, notably Alexander Murray’s ongoing multivolume series of monographs on Suicide in the Middle Ages, Georges Minois’s History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture, Marzio Barbagli’s Farewell to the World: A History of Suicide, and the extended archive assembled by Margaret Pabst Battin for the transhistorical and global anthology The Ethics of Suicide: Historical Sources.⁴⁷ The classic intellectual-historical account of early modern English attitudes to voluntary death remains Michael MacDonald and Terence Murphy’s coauthored Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (1990).⁴⁸ Shrinking centuries down to three pithy sentences, MacDonald and Murphy offer a usefully compact fast-forward through the just-so story of changing Western attitudes toward suicide:

Ancient philosophies that condoned and in some cases celebrated suicide gave way in the Middle Ages to theological condemnations and folkloric abhorrence. The Reformation intensified religious hostility to self-murder in England and some other European countries. Finally, in the eighteenth century, Enlightenment philosophy and the secularization of the world view of European elites prompted writers to depict suicide as the consequences of mental illness or rational choice, and these concepts still dominate discussions of self-destruction today.⁴⁹

Contracting from this summary of the West-in-general to the specific shifts within England captured in their source documents, MacDonald and Murphy detect an observable curve, first sloping upward and then gradually downward, in the intensity of a broadly held attitude of severity. This shifting affective barometer implies a kind of unified cultural stance that, upon closer examination, frays along dividing lines of social class:

The thesis that we argue below can be stated briefly. During the early modern period attitudes and responses to suicide first hardened and then grew more tolerant and sympathetic. The intensification of hostility to self-killing in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was the result of the Tudor revolutions in government and religion—the rise of the modern state and the Protestant reformation. The decline in severity to suicide after 1660 had more complex causes. They included local hostility to the forfeiture of self-murderers’ goods, the abolition of the prerogative courts during the English revolution, the governing elites intensifying reverence for private property, the reaction against religious enthusiasm, the rise of the new science, Enlightenment philosophy, the increase in literacy among the middling classes, the vast expansion of the periodical press, and the gradual absorption of empirical epistemology into the mentality of the middle and upper classes.⁵⁰

There is, then, a secularization hypothesis within an institutional and legal history that drives the book’s case studies. MacDonald and Murphy track a slow, general withdrawal from consideration of supernatural interference when inquests and courts examined the causal factors in individual cases of voluntary death.⁵¹ Participants in inquests and court cases hoped to distinguish the category of felo-de-se (a contraction of felonia de seipso, a phrase rich with biopolitical ironies that defines life as a form of property that agents have consciously and deliberately stolen from themselves) from the far smaller number of cases in which a subject did not understand the consequences of their own actions, which were ruled non compos mentis.⁵² Part of a series edited by Keith Thomas, Sleepless Souls arguably shows the influence of Thomas’s classic thesis regarding the decline of magic as it tracks a shift in mentalité from 1500 to 1800. Broadly stated and supported with extensive evidence from court records and letters and print media, their thesis is not, I think, generally false (it is hard to debate a causal claim that distributes causality across nine different factors). I am indebted to its groundwork, and I do not intend to disregard its utility as an account of what court records show.

More recent historical work has sharpened some of the details. Discussing city records between 1601 and the 1640s, historian Paul Seaver notes that there were four distinct categories of verdict possible for coroners in cases of unusual deaths: misadventure, homicide, self-killing, and acts of God.⁵³ The requirement of forfeiture of possessions to the government in cases ruled felo-de-se remained on the books in England until 1870.⁵⁴ Looking at the records of the vicar general, Seaver notes thirty-one cases in which apparent suicides were licensed for Christian burial: In the course of the next four decades a series of vicars general in the name of the bishops of London granted thirty-one licenses for the Christian burial of suicides, but these petitions never challenged or extenuated either the fact of self-murder or the moral opprobrium attached to the act.⁵⁵ Location inflected method; perhaps due to the larger number of apothecaries, people in London were more likely to kill themselves with poison, while Kentish citizens tended toward drowning.⁵⁶ Interestingly, only two of the thirty-one cases mentioned temptation by the devil.⁵⁷ Still, the prevalent trajectory of the intellectual history of self-killing as a transition from supernatural explanation to the dawn of psychopathology holds fast in the field at large, and is neatly signaled in the title of a relatively recent anthology of essays—in which Seaver’s own work appears—on the topic: From Sin to Insanity: Suicide in Early Modern Europe (2004).⁵⁸ Case closed?

The textual moments that detain me in the present book supplement this story with a counterarchive of recalcitrant objects, unruly scenes, and discordant but exemplary cases that seem to me to complicate and partially resist the teleological tendency of such narratives and the secularization hypotheses they rely upon. There are early cases of celebration in the midst of the age of severity, and there are late examples of horrified censure in the midst of cresting tolerance. In the texts that interest me, I see neither a straightforward age of severity nor the lenience and toleration to come, but a third term that is mostly missing from MacDonald and Murphy’s account and others in its wake, and indeed from most discussions of the subject: levity. Of course, as anyone who has been the object of homophobic or racist jokes can attest, one can be both an object of levity and an object of censure or horror at the same time. In some of the cases examined in this book, that precise combination is present. But in many other examples that I will consider, the reader will encounter aesthetic modes that are underdiscussed in early modernity, unruly forms of self-sacrificial camp, suicidal slapstick, morbid parody, and the darkest shades of black comedy alongside the expressions of vehement severity or reluctant compassion that standard histories have primed us to expect.⁵⁹ Taken collectively, these examples complicate the secularizing passage from horror to tolerance, and suggest that the age of severity was also an age of levity.

By contrast with the legal archives that understandably tend to dominate the historical literature, Joy of the Worm is unabashedly a work of literary criticism, grounded in readings of particular works by particular authors, in which the affordances of literature surpass the decisive binaries of coroner’s verdicts. These readings open out a peacock’s fan of unexpected and striking stances toward self-killing. I do not intend to catalog all possible stances on the topic in the period, because that broader survey work has been done. Among literary studies on the subject, I am indebted to early studies of the representation of suicide by S. E. Sprott and Roland Wymer, and, more recently, to Eric Langley’s Narcissism and Suicide in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2009) and Marlena Tronicke’s Shakespeare’s Suicides: Dead Bodies That Matter (2018).⁶⁰ Precisely because both broad surveys and author-specific surveys of the subject of voluntary death in early modern literature and Shakespeare exist, I am better able to focus upon the particular tonal and generic effect of joy-within-death that aligns my particular objects, without feeling the need to include every character, scene, speech, or incident potentially relevant to the fairly ubiquitous human scenario of voluntary death. Accordingly, some examples (Spenser’s Cave of Despair in The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece, Milton’s Samson) that one might justifiably expect are absent. They are undeniably cases of self-killing in early modern English literature, but they do not meet an additional but perhaps unexpected requirement: they do not spark joy.⁶¹

Joy of the Worm

It is the wager of this book that More’s tale, and the assemblage of texts to which it will here be joined, can collectively illuminate a perverse and pervasive aesthetic mode within early modern English literature: representations of self-killing that imagine the scene or prospect of voluntary death as an occasion for humor, mirth, laughter, ecstatic pleasure, even joy and celebration. In honor of the clown who brings Cleopatra the basket of figs and fatal serpents in Antony and Cleopatra, I call this literary dynamic of pleasure in self-destruction joy of the worm. Let me say at once that my examples do not imply a communally shared and singular attitude toward death as a desirable outcome by each author whose work I am interpreting in this book. In some cases, positive affects at the prospect of death help to ease one’s passage out of life; in other cases, humorous mockery, parody, and comedic responses within scenes of self-killing function therapeutically to critique the urge to die, encouraging readers and audiences to reconsider the force of passion. Censure can yield to rescue, but there are no guarantees of survival. Some texts offer us handholds out of the pit; some egg us on toward self-destruction. Neither entirely antisocial nor resolutely prosocial, joy of the worm changes form and switches sides as it wriggles into tight corners.

Though it may seem heterodox or recondite, this recurring textual phenomenon illuminates ongoing and categorical chasms between art and ethics, and jostles the fragile links that bind mortal individuals to their communal surround. The seemingly minor aesthetic mode named by joy of the worm opens a broader set of questions about the relationship of generic frames and codes of decorum to power, inequality, and the uneven distribution of agency. When laughter surfaces, who is laughing, and at whom? Sidestepping the now overfamiliar subversion/containment dyad that would dutifully muster aesthetic forms into service as either conservative reification or radical contestation, I hope joy of the worm might prompt reconsideration of how literature participates in ongoing processes of social stratification that it also corrodes.

Specifically, the dignity of self-possession implicit in the